Trump administration reportedly orders Pentagon to plan for sweeping defense budget cuts – live

The White House has reshared a social media post from Donald Trump, calling the president a king and picturing him in a crown.

This afternoon, Donald Trump wrote on the social media platform Truth Social, “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”

His post referenced a letter his transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, sent to New York governor Kathy Hochul today, ending the Department of Transportation’s agreement with the state over a toll policy for lower Manhattan.

Shortly after, the White House shared the quote from Trump on social media, alongside a computer-generated image of a smiling Trump wearing a crown on a stylized version of a Time magazine cover, with the word “Time” replaced with “Trump”.

In his address, Pritzker recalled in 1978 when a neo-Nazi group wanted to march through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb that he said was once home to the largest number of Holocaust survivors in the world. The ensuing legal battle and controversy ultimately led to a supreme court decision in favor of the group’s right to march. The demonstration was ultimately canceled days before and the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center was formed in Skokie.

Pritzker credited the resistance and resilience of ordinary Illinoians for defusing the Nazis threat.

“If we don’t want to repeat history then for god sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it,” he said.

Pritzker concluded the thirty-plus minute speech with a call to action.

“Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance,” he said. “Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity Illinois and do not let the tragic spirit of despair overcome us when our country needs us most.”

Pritzker, who is seen as a possible 2028 presidential contender, has adopted a far more confrontational posture toward the Trump administration than other blue state governors.

“We don’t have Kings in America and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one,” Pritzker vowed, as the official White House social media account posted a photo of Trump wearing a crown with the words “Long Live the King”.

In his remarks, he defended the approach, arguing: “Going along to get along does not work.”

Responding to scattered boos in the audience, the governor warned that Trump’s cuts to federal agencies would affect conservatives and liberals alike. “You can boo all you want until your constituents lose these services,” he said.

“If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this,” he continued. “It took the Nazis 1 month, 3 weeks, 2 days, 8 hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. And all I’m saying is when the 5-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker on Wednesday delivered a searing state-of-the-state address, likening Donald Trump’s stunning power grabs to the rise of Nazism in 1930’s Germany.

“I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly,” Pritzker told a joint session of the Illinois House and Senate in Springfield, the state’s capital. Speaking as “an American and a Jew” who helped build the state’s Holocaust Museum, Pritzker said he was “watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now”.

Trump’s attacks on DEI, LGBTQ people and immigrants was part of an “authoritarian playbook,” the Democratic governor said.

“They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems. I just have one question,” he said. “What comes next?”

Good afternoon, thanks for joining our US politics coverage today – nearly one month into the second Trump administration. I’m Cecilia Nowell, taking over our coverage into the evening.

Donald Trump’s first and second vice presidents have had markedly different reactions to the president’s comments on the war in Ukraine.

In an interview published today by the conservative British tabloid, the Daily Mail, JD Vance warned Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy that “badmouthing” Trump is a bad idea.

“The idea that Zelenskyy is going to change the president’s mind by bad mouthing him in public media, everyone who knows the President will tell you that is an atrocious way to deal with this administration,” Vance said.

Meanwhile, former vice president Mike Pence – who notably fell out of favor with the president after the 6 January attack on the US Capitol and declined to endorse Trump in the 2024 election – struck a different tone.

“Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth,” Pence wrote on social media today.

Both comments follow an escalating exchange between the US and Ukrainian presidents. After Trump implied Ukraine had started the war, which began after Russia invaded Ukraine, during a press conference yesterday, Zelenskyy said Trump was trapped in a Russian “disinformation bubble”. Today, Trump called Zelenskyy “a dictator” and warned that he “better move fast” or he “won’t have a country left”.

Here are Pjotr Sauer and Luke Harding with more:

Much of the day so far has been dominated by the fallout of Donald Trump’s unprecedented and extraordinary attack on the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom he called “a dictator without elections” who had “done a terrible job”. In the rant rife with falsehoods about the Ukrainian leader’s popularity among other things, Trump warned Zelenskyy that he “better move fast” or he “won’t have a country left”.

Trump accused Zelenskyy (baselessly) of benefiting from continuing US financial and military support, suggesting he had an interest in prolonging the war rather than seeking its end. Trump’s latest comments, which parrot key talking points of Vladimir Putin’s regime, cast serious doubt on future US aid to Ukraine and mark the most explicit threat yet to end the war on terms favourable to Moscow. European leaders are scrambling to contain the crisis (German chancellor Olaf Scholz called Trump’s comments “wrong and dangerous”), while several Republican lawmakers in the US rushed to distance themselves from Trump’s remarks.

Earlier in the day, Zelenskyy had said Trump was “living in a disinformation bubble”, in response to the US president last night blaming Ukraine for Russia’s illegal invasion. Trump made the comments in response to Zelenskyy’s concerns that Ukraine had not been invited to the talks between the US and Russia on Tuesday.

Elsewhere:

• The Trump administration has ordered the Pentagon to plan for sweeping budget cuts, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Post. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the US military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years. He has given a deadline of 24 February.

• Senate majority leader John Thune said the upper chamber will still go ahead and begin vote-a-rama on the budget plan tomorrow, according to Fox News. This is despite Trump throwing his support behind the House’s competing version of the budget blueprint earlier on Wednesday.

• The Trump administration said it is not disbursing funds for thousands of foreign aid contracts and grants despite a federal judge’s order last week to lift a widespread freeze on foreign aid funding.

• A federal judge refused on Tuesday to immediately block Elon Musk and Doge from accessing government data systems or participating in worker layoffs. The US district judge Tanya Chutkan found that there were legitimate questions about the billionaire’s authority but said there was not enough evidence of grave legal harm to justify a temporary restraining order.

• Donald Trump signed an executive order making independent regulatory agencies established by Congress now accountable to the White House – a move that some experts said clashes with mainstream interpretations of the constitution. The order forces major regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to report new policy priorities to the executive branch for approval, which will also have a say over their budgets.

• The Trump administration’s planned cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) not only threaten essential biomedical research in the US, but the livelihoods of researchers – and some are seriously considering leaving the country.

Further to the news that Donald Trump has thrown his support behind the House’s budget plan, Fox News reports that Senate majority leader John Thune has said the upper chamber will still go ahead and begin vote-a-rama on the budget plan tomorrow.

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth has ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the US military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Post.

Hegseth ordered the proposed cuts to be drawn up by 24 February, according to the memo, which includes a list of 17 categories that the Trump administration wants exempted. Among them: operations at the southern US border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense and acquisition of one-way attack drones and other munitions. If adopted in full, the proposed cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years.

According to the Post, the memo calls for continued “support agency” funding for several major regional headquarters, including Indo-Pacific command, northern command and space command. Notably absent from that list is European command, which has had a leading role in executing US strategy during the war in Ukraine; central command, which oversees operations in the Middle East; and Africa command, which manages the several thousand troops the Pentagon has spread across that continent.

“President Trump’s charge to DoD is clear: achieve peace through strength,” Hegseth wrote in the memo, dated Tuesday.

The time for preparation is over – we must act urgently to revive the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and re-establish deterrence. Our budget will resource the fighting force we need, cease unnecessary defense spending, reject excessive bureaucracy, and drive actionable reform including progress on the audit.

All the effort Kyiv had expended in wooing the White House, combining flattery with bribery and a share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, imploded in minutes when Volodymyr Zelenskyy broke the fundamental rule of the new global reality: he told the truth about Donald Trump.

It is hardly surprising Zelenskyy lost his cool. Part of the reason he has a 57% confidence rating in the latest poll (13% above Trump’s own current standing) is because he has led his country through years of war with his heart vividly on his sleeve. Having been subjected to eight years of Russian aggression, followed by an entirely unprovoked full-on invasion which has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens, and then to be told on the world stage: “You should have never started it”, would be too much for most people.

When slighted and sprayed with Trumpian falsehoods, other world leaders, with much less at stake, have resorted to a “smile-and-wave” default strategy, deflecting direct questions and changing the subject to some aspect of relations with Washington that is still functioning normally.

Zelenskyy did not do this on Wednesday. Instead, he said out loud the bit that European leaders keep quiet. Trump, he observed, is “trapped in this disinformation bubble”. He was stating the obvious, but not even Zelenskyy could have known how fetid the air inside Trump’s bubble has become. Now we know.

Trump’s tirade on his own app, Truth Social, is a distillation of the greatest hits of Russian disinformation from the past three years. He said Zelenskyy was “A Dictator without Elections” (something Trump has never said about Putin) who had hoodwinked the Biden administration into a $350bn war of choice, which only “TRUMP” could fix. The president’s repeated references to himself in the third person and all caps erased any lingering doubts about the single unifying compulsion now driving Trump foreign policy.

Read Julian’s full analysis here:

This is an extract from my colleague John Crace’s weekly UK politics sketch – and this week he’s focusing on Trump:

Even by his recent standards, Tuesday night’s stream of unconsciousness from Donald Trump took some beating. Hot on the tail of excluding Ukraine from the first round of peace talks with Russia and in effect threatening to withdraw the US from Nato, the Donald has now suggested it was Kyiv who started the war with Moscow.

More than that, he declared President Zelenskyy’s popularity ratings had slid to just 4% in his own country and that he had assumed the role of dictator by not holding elections. He ended by claiming that the US had given more than three times as much aid to Ukraine than the rest of Europe combined. You could almost hear Vladimir Putin cheering from the sidelines. He couldn’t have written the script any better. It was perfection.

It goes without saying that everything the US president had said was complete doggy-bollox. Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014 and seized Crimea. There was then a pause in hostilities before Putin invaded a second time almost exactly three years ago. Claiming Ukraine started the war was like believing that Poland invaded Germany to trigger the second world war.

That was just the start. Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy’s approval ratings were 4% were just his delusional, senescent fantasies. The real figure is 57%: about 10% higher than the Donald’s own. And no one in their right mind is suggesting Ukraine holds elections while the war is ongoing. There again, Trump is clearly not in his right mind. His aid figures are also way off. Collectively, Europe has given Ukraine £132bn since the start of the war. America has given £114bn.

While a shrink would have a field day trying to untangle the workings of the Trump psyche – is he a narcissist or solipsist? Does he actually believe what he says or do his words have an independent existence to his brain? – it’s left to the rest of us to pick up the pieces. Much as they might like not to, other world leaders have to find a way of engaging with him. The Donald is the most powerful man on the planet and whatever he says counts for something.

You can read the full politics sketch here:

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, will visit Washington next week amid other meetings aimed at bringing an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, US national security advisor Mike Waltz said on Wednesday.

Asked about the chances of reaching a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, Waltz told Fox News in an interview: “We’re engaging on all sides, and then the next step is we’re going to put technical teams forward to start talking more details.”

It comes amid fears of an irreconcilable rift between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the former leader launched a war of false words on the Ukrainian president, whom he called “a dictator” and warned that he “better move fast” or he “won’t have a country left”. (We have factchecked Trump’s rant here).

The unprecedented escalation of tensions between Kyiv and Washington came after senior US and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to discuss the war in Ukraine, as well as economic and political cooperation, indicating a fundamental shift in the US approach to Moscow.

In the latest edition of This Week in Trumpland, my colleague Adam Gabbatt writes:

What came of those talks? Well, on Tuesday Trump came out with a curiously Putin-centric view of the war, and of how to end it. Declaring himself ‘disappointed’ that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, had objected to not being part of talks which directly affect the future of his country, Trump blamed Ukraine for Russia’s invasion, and trotted out Kremlin talking points about Zelenskyy’s approval rating among Ukrainians.

In a few days Trump has apparently swallowed whole Russia’s revisionist claims about how the war began, and potentially driven a rift between the US and Europe in how it should end. Could it be that the author of Think Big and Kick Ass, and Trump 101: The Way to Success (both books were actually ghostwritten, but you get the idea), doesn’t really know much about kicking ass or the route to success? It’s not for me to say.

You can sign up for Adam’s weekly newsletter here.

Following Donald Trump’s incendiary comments earlier today calling the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a “dictator” who had “done a terrible job”, Republicans have moved swiftly to distance themselves from Trump’s attacks.

The North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, who has just come from a visit to Ukraine, said Putin does not want peace, he “wants to dictate the world”. “That invasion was the responsibility of one human being on the face of this planet: Vladimir Putin,” Tillis told NBC News. On Trump calling Zelenskyy a dictator: “It’s not a word I would use.”

The Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski told CNN: “I would like to see that in context because I would certainly never refer to President Zelenskyy as a dictator.”

Speaking to HuffPost, the South Dakota senator Mike Rounds called Zelenskyy “the duly elected” president of Ukraine. “I think he has been a key component in the fact that they’ve been able to withstand the Russian attacks,” Rounds said. He answered “no” when asked if US foreign policy was realigning with Russia.

Don Bacon, a Representative for Nebraska, posted on X: “Putin started this war. Putin committed war crimes. Putin is the dictator who murdered his opponents. The EU nations have contributed more to Ukraine. Zelenskyy polls over 50%. Ukraine wants to be part of the West, Putin hates the West. I don’t accept George Orwell’s doublethink.”

Donald Trump threw his support behind the House’s budget blueprint on Wednesday, throwing a curveball into the Senate’s plan to vote on a competing version this week, Politico reports.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, the president said:

The House and Senate are doing a SPECTACULAR job of working together as one unified, and unbeatable, TEAM, however, unlike the Lindsey Graham version of the very important Legislation currently being discussed, the House Resolution implements my FULL America First Agenda, EVERYTHING, not just parts of it! We need both Chambers to pass the House Budget to “kickstart” the Reconciliation process, and move all of our priorities to the concept of, “ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL.” It will, without question, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

The House Speaker, Mike Johnson, who quickly celebrated Trump’s endorsement on X, plans to bring the plan to the floor for a vote next week.

Trump’s announcement comes as the Senate leadership has prepared their own budget plan, which would divide up the president’s policy priorities into two bills, for a floor vote in the coming days.

“As they say, did not see that one coming,” said Senate majority leader John Thune, telling reporters that he hoped to gain further clarity on the future of the two-bill plan from a previously scheduled lunch meeting with vice-president JD Vance.

“We’ve got a plan that we think makes sense,” Thune told reporters. “We’re planning to proceed. But you know, obviously, we are interested in and hoping to hear with more clarity where the White House is coming from.”

Donald Trump’s efforts to influence US cultural institutions received more pushback on Tuesday, as a group of more than 400 artists sent a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) calling on the organization to resist the president’s restrictions on funding for projects promoting diversity or “gender ideology”.

The letter, first reported by the New York Times, comes after the NEA declared that federal grant applicants – which include colleges and universities, non-profit groups, individual artists and more – must comply with regulations stipulated by Trump’s executive orders. The new measures bar federal funds from going toward programs focused on “diversity, equity and inclusion” or used to “promote gender ideology”.

“While the arts community stands in solidarity with the NEA, we oppose this betrayal of the Endowment’s mission to ‘foster and sustain an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States’,” the letter reads. “We ask that the NEA reverse those changes to the compliance requirements.”

Here’s more on that story: